OXFORD PHILOSOPHERS
Duns Scotus
According to Dons Scotus ‘being’ was not analogous, but univocal: it had exactly the same meaning no matter what it was applied to. It meant the same whether it was applied to God or to a flea. It was, in fact, a
disjunctive predicate. If you listed all possible predicates from A to Z, then the verb ‘to be’ was equivalent to ‘to be A or B or C. . . or Z’. The meaning of ‘to be’, therefore, depended on the content of all the predicates; it did not in any way depend on the subject of the sentence in which it occurred.
A predicate must be univocal, Scotus argued, if one is to be able to apply to it the principle of noncontradiction, and make use of it in deductive
arguments. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.167.)
Being, for Scotus, includes the Infinite. How does he know? How can he establish that, among the things that there are, is an infinite God? He offers a number of proofs, which at first sight resemble those of Aquinas.
One proof, for instance, makes use of the concept of causality to prove the existence of a First Cause. Suppose that we have something capable of being brought into existence. (Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief
History of Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.167.)
Scotus makes a distinction between intuitive and abstractive knowledge.
Abstractive knowledge is knowledge of the essence of an object,
considered in abstraction from the question whether the object exists or not. Intuitive knowledge is knowledge of an object as existent: it comes in two kinds, perfect intuition when an object is present, and imperfect intuition which is memory of a past or anticipation of a future object.
(Anthony Kenny An Illustrated Brief History of Western Phılosophy, Blackwell Publishing 2006 p.169.)
